Sunday, August 31, 2014

The oil industry has stopped laying golden eggs. Its profits are being squeezed. That news has not been widely reported. But, Andrew Nikiforuk writes, it has been hiding in plain sight on the U.S. Energy Administration website:

Last July the government agency, which has collected mundane
statistics on energy matters for decades, quietly revealed that 127 of
the world's largest oil and gas companies are running out of cash.

They are now spending more than they are
earning. Profits have lagged as expenditures have risen. Overburdened by
debt, these firms are selling assets.

The math is simple. The 127 firms generated
$568 billion in cash from their operations during 2013-2014 while their
expenses totalled $677 billion. To cover the difference of $110
billion, the energy giants increased their debt load or sold off assets.

The reason for the cash squeeze is that oil is harder to find and harder to get at:

Most companies are now investing in high-cost and high-risk projects
to mine difficult hydrocarbons such as bitumen or shale oil, according
to Carbon Tracker. Hydraulic fracturing, the land equivalent of ocean
bottom trawling, adds to the cost of oil, too.

It's not only the firms deploying fracking
that are racking up high debt loads. Chinese state-owned corporations,
for example, plopped down $30 billion to develop junk crude in the
oilsands over the last decade.

And the oil companies are making these investments as demand for oil is flattening:

But given that oil demand in places like Europe, the United States and
Japan is flattening or declining, many analysts don't think that
high-carbon, high-risk projects (which all need a $75 to $95 market
price for oil to break even) make much economic sense in a
carbon-constrained world.

Yet our present government has put all its eggs in the bitumen basket. This is a not government known for its foresight. Mr. Harper gave his full throated support to the American invasion of Iraq. That didn't work out so well. And he also didn't see the 2008 recession around the bend.

Others, however, saw this price squeeze -- and its economic consequences -- coming long ago:

Marion King Hubbert, a Shell geologist, predicted
this development decades ago and presented the cultural conundrum
clearly: "During the last two centuries we have known nothing but an
exponential growth culture, a culture so dependent upon the continuance
of exponential growth for its stability that is incapable of reckoning
with problems of non-growth."

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Stephen Harper has just completed his ninth tour of the North. These tours provide the prime minister with an opportunity to serve up warm rhetoric. On this occasion, Harper saved his most heated words for Vladimir Putin. But he said nothing about the North's increasingly warm atmosphere. Jeffrey Simpson writes:

Nowhere in Canada is the impact of climate change more increasingly
evident than the North. And yet, the words “climate change” are never
heard from Mr. Harper in the North, as if the idea they connote are so
distasteful that he cannot bring himself to utter them.

The surrealism of a Harper visit is like that of an explorer who
lands in an unknown place, takes careful note in his diary of the
animals, flora, fauna, rocks and trees but misses all the human
inhabitants. Mr. Harper’s refusal even to speak the words “climate
change” in the North cannot be from ignorance or inadvertence; it must
be by design, like everything he does.

That design is evidently to
draw as little attention as possible to an issue he has found
uncomfortable since even before he became Prime Minister.

As an
economist, Mr. Harper believes most measures to combat the problem of
global warming will be too costly. As a Conservative politician, he
believes no votes are to be gained by resolute action, given that so
many of his core supporters are doubters and deniers of the reality of
climate change. As an Albertan, he will protect the fossil fuel
industries, and in particular bitumen oil, at all costs and by all
means. As an international leader, he sees some other countries talking a
better game than they play, and does not wish Canada to be made the
fool by doing anything dramatic.

Mr. Harper is a man who sees what he wants to see and hears what he wants to hear -- as he ignores the obvious. It is truly remarkable that a man whose chief talent is ignoring the obvious is also Prime Minister of Canada.

Friday, August 29, 2014

Justin Trudeau said recently that the biggest threat to global security is "the kind of violence
and misunderstandings and wars that come out of resource
depletion—concerns of lack of hope for generations growing up in a world
that is getting smaller and seemingly less and less fair.”

Alberta MP Michelle Rempel took to her Facebook page, writing that Trudeau's statement sent her into a "blind-rage." Justin has that effect on Harperites. Paul Wells writes that there are at least a couple of reasons for that. First, as one Tory said in an email,

That is because most
Tory MPs come from very practical, real-world career backgrounds in
small business (Joe Preston), policing (Rick Norlock), or farming (Gerry
Ritz), to name a few. Others have track records of governing (John
Baird) or legislating (Jason Kenney). They have painstakingly built
their reputations and livelihoods over decades of work.”

Which is curious. Trudeau the Younger holds two Bachelors degrees -- in literature and education. It's true he lacks "real world" experience. Stephen Harper also holds two degrees -- in economics. But his only "real" job was working in the mail room for Imperial Oil. Blind is the operative word.The second -- and the real reason -- for Conservative rage is Trudeau's name. Harperites still rage at Trudeau the Elder. Two days after Justin delivered the eulogy at his father's funeral, the future prime minister published an op-ed in The National Post:

Harper wrote that he
had passed the elder Trudeau in the street a year earlier and been
struck by “a tired out, little old man” who had once “provoked both the
loves and hatreds of my political passion.” The loves came first for
Harper, he wrote, the hatreds as he matured. He called Trudeau “a
distant leader who neither understood, nor cared to understand, a group
of people over whom his actions had immense impact,” a man who
“flail[ed] from one pet policy objective to another,” whose government
“created huge deficits, a mammoth national debt, high taxes, bloated
bureaucracy, rising unemployment, record inﬂation, curtailed trade and
declining competitiveness.”

The op-ed always said more about Harper than it did about Trudeau. In fact, with a couple of exceptions, it's a pretty good description of Harper. But, most of all, the piece revealed that Stephen Harper was -- and is -- a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

Conservatives have done everything they can to bury PierreTrudeau. Petro Canada is a now a private corporation and they have consistently refused to recognize the Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- in both history and in legislation. Still, the Son has risen to haunt their dreams.What do they do now?

Thursday, August 28, 2014

The central theme of Stephen Harper's re-election campaign has emerged: Harper against the elites. In his tour of the North, Harper called Justin Trudeau an elitist. And, this week, Fred DeLorey sent out an email to conservative supporters, complaining about Heather Mallick's reference to Harper's sociopathic tendencies:

"If you ever had any doubt that the urban media elite are mobilizing against us, this ridiculous piece should end it," he wrote.

In her defence, Mallick told the Vancouver Observer:

He lacks a moral conscience when he comes to people he dislikes or distrusts. And that's the definition of a sociopath."

Harper's attack on "elites" is classic Orwellian inversion. And that's why Harper has declared war on sociologists. They reveal that, as Harper attacks elites, he serves their interests. Businesses don't need tax cuts to survive. They need customers. Crime is not just about personal responsibility. It's about social responsibility. Harper claims to support our troops, as he cuts services to veterans.

George Orwell knew how it worked. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. But, most of all, ignorance is strength. As long as voters remain ignorant, Harper can remain prime minister.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

So what does Harper have against sociology? First, Harper is clearly
trumpeting a standard component of neo-liberal ideology: that there are
no social phenomena, only individual incidents. (This ideology traces
back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as
society.”) Neo-liberalism paints all social problems as individual
problems. The benefit of this for those who share Harper’s agenda, of
course, is that if there are no social problems or solutions, then there
is little need for government. Individuals are solely responsible for
the problems they face.

Harper recognizes only one kind of injustice -- personal injustice. Sociologists recognize personal injustices. But they also recognize systematic injustice:

Structural injustices,
on the other hand, are produced by a social structure or system. They
are often hard to trace back to the actions of specific individuals, are
usually not explicitly intended by anyone, and have collective, rather
than isolated, victims. Structural injustices are a result of the
unintended actions of many individuals participating in a social system
together, usually without knowing what each other is doing. Whereas
personal injustices are traced back to the harmful actions (or
inactions) of individuals, structural injustices are identified by
differential societal outcomes among groups. Sociologists call these
“social inequalities.”

And therein lies the
rub. Perhaps the key difference between personal and structural
injustices is that the latter are only clearly identifiable through
macro-level societal analysis — that is, sociology. This is because a)
there are no clear perpetrators with whom to identify the injustice and
assign responsibility; and b) while structural injustices do generate
concrete harms and victims, we often only learn about the collective
nature of the injustice through statistical inquiry, or by identifying
social/demographic patterns over time.

Structural injustices are harder to remedy because they are immune to simple solutions. And Mr. Harper favours simple solutions.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Murray Dobbins' analysis is never superficial. He looks for root causes. In his latest column, he notes that two television shows -- House of Cards and Breaking Bad -- were tremendously popular. He suspects that, just as science fiction movies of the 1950's were about Cold War paranoia, these two shows were really about the psychopathy of 21st century capitalism. He quotes Canadian author Patricia Pearson:

The celebration of remorselessness is everywhere. Friends on Facebook
have lately been reporting their scores on widely circulating
psychopathy quizzes that ask users to agree or disagree with statements
such as, 'I never feel remorse, shame or guilt about something I've said
or done.' 'I'm 19-per-cent psychopath!' they announce. Or: 'I scored
five out of 10!' As if the chilling absence of human empathy I witnessed
as a crime reporter in covering trials like that of serial killer Paul
Bernardo had become a fun little personality quirk.

Captialism has now become hyper-competitive. And the consequences are truly disturbing:

The stronger the imperative to compete, the weaker become family,
community and friendship connections because in rampant consumer
capitalism -- promoted and reinforced by television culture -- such
connections are seen as irrelevant. Or worse, they are seen as weak and
inefficient means, if not actual barriers, to the end of achieving more
stuff. We are competing in a zero-sum game whose rules are written by
those with psychopathic tendencies.

It's that psychopathology which is a the root of our democratic crisis:

It is not first-past-the-post voting systems, or the cancellation of
government funding for parties, or even the role of TV advertising. It
is at its core our gradual acquiescence "to things that are contrary to
our individual and communal interests." This acquiescence, says [Fred] Guerin,
is the "consequence of very gradual political and corporate
indoctrination that consolidates power not only by inducing fear and
uncertainty, but also by rewarding unbridled greed, opportunism and
self-interest."

If we want to reclaim our democracy, Dobbin writes, we need to discover an old human trait -- kindness:

British writer Barbara Taylor has suggested in her essay "On Kindness"
(co-authored by Adam Phillips) that the missing ingredient is just
that: kindness. The authors point out that for almost all of human
history, people considered themselves naturally kind. Christian
philosophy called on people to "love thy neighbour as thyself." But by
the 17th century, kindness was under attack by competitive
individualism. Today, says Taylor, "An image of self has been created
that is utterly lacking in natural generosity." This is in spite of
numerous studies that show giving provides far more pleasure than
taking. People involved in these studies are astonished by the results
-- and simply don't trust them.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Stephen Harper spent the week wandering around the North, crowd testing his stump speech for the 2015 election. Chantal Hebert writes that, before decides to take the plunge, Harper faces two challenges.

The first is Michael Chong's parliamentary reform bill -- which would put significant curbs on his power. Because Chong and former Conservative M.P. Brent Rathgeber seem to be the only Harper M.P.'s courageous enough to think for themselves, the prime minister will probably swat aside that potential problem.

But he faces a bigger problem -- a by-election for Jim Flaherty's Oshawa-Whitby seat:

For as long as the
former finance minister was its MP, the riding of Whitby-Oshawa was not
on anyone’s list of top seats at play and that likely would not have
changed had the Conservatives succeeded in bringing Flaherty’s widow, Christine Elliott, over to the federal arena.

But Elliott, who was
reelected to the Ontario legislature in the spring, has set her sights
on the provincial Tory leadership and Tim Hudak’s succession.

Whitby-Oshawa landed
in the Conservative column in 2006 and Flaherty increased his share of
the vote to more than 50 per cent over the two subsequent elections. But
it was previously in Liberal hands and the party has been on a bit of a
by-election roll since Justin Trudeau became its leader.

In the recent Ontario election -- where provincial and federal ridings are congruent -- politics took a distinctly anti-Harper turn. And it's worth remembering that Flaherty's seat used to belong to former NDP leader Ed Broadbent. Voters in that riding could prove to be far more independent than Harper's caucus.

If Harper loses Oshawa-Whitby, it could serve as a bell weather for what will happen in Ontario. If Ontario turns against Harper, he will have no majority. And, if a majority is out of reach, Harper will have to ditch his stump speech -- and, perhaps, politics altogether.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

In a recent speech to the Canadian Medical Association, Health Minister Rona Ambrose told her audience:

“At the end of the day, for policymakers like me, it’s the medical
science and data-based evidence that must guide our decisions on health
sector regulation and allocation of resources.”

It was a remarkable statement. In October, she announced that her government would no longer allow doctors to prescribe medical heroin because:

There is no evidence at this point that heroin … giving heroin to heroin
addicts … is any way an effective treatment … As I said, there is no
evidence that this is an effective, safe treatment … no clinical
evidence … There is no clear evidence to suggest that this a safe
treatment and it’s not a good idea for Health Canada to be supporting
giving heroin to heroin addicts when there’s no scientific evidence that
this is a safe treatment …

But Michael Spratt writes:

Actually, there’s copious evidence supporting the use of medical-grade
opiates to treat addiction. The European Monitoring Centre for Drug and
Drug Addiction released a 176-page study on the use of doctor-supervised medicinal heroin. Here’s what the study found:

Over the past 15 years, six RCTs have been conducted involving more than
1,500 patients, and they provide strong evidence, both individually and
collectively, in support of the efficacy of treatment with fully
supervised self-administered injectable heroin, when compared with oral
MMT, for long-term refractory heroin-dependent individuals. These have
been conducted in six countries: Switzerland (Perneger et al., 1998);
the Netherlands (van den Brink et al., 2003); Spain (March et al.,
2006); Germany (Haasen et al., 2007), Canada (Oviedo-Joekes et al.,
2009) and England (Strang et al., 2010).

For Harperians, when facts get in the way of ideology, facts lose. This is particularly true at the Ministry of Justice:

In May the federal government cut Justice’s research budget by $1.2 million. According to an internal government report,
the Justice Department’s research budget was slashed just as an
internal report for the deputy minister was warning its findings “may
run contrary to government direction” and have “at times left the
impression that research is undermining government decisions” and is not
“aligned with government or departmental priorities.”

And, so, the they continue their war on reality. And, when reality gets in the way, they create their own.

Friday, August 22, 2014

The death of Tina Fontaine has once again sparked demands for a public enquiry into the epidemic of murdered and missing aboriginal women. But, yesterday, Stephen Harper again rejected those demands:

"We should not view this as sociological phenomenon," the prime minister told a news conference Thursday. "We should view it as crime. It is crime against innocent people, and it needs to be addressed as such."

Mr. Harper has never been interested in the causes of crime. He cares only about punishment, thinking -- with his usual tunnel vision -- that stiffer punishment will put an end to it.

But there's more to it than that. He is adamantly opposed to any and all public enquiries -- because he knows that the opposition can use an enquiry to ride to power. Just as he did. A public enquiry would inevitably find fault with public policy -- his public policy -- starting with his ditching of the Kelowna Accord.

So it in Mr. Harper's self interest to refuse to hold a public enquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women. For, despite his claim that he is a Conservative, the truth is that Mr. Harper is a Randian. Both he and the dour Russian emigré stand four square for the notion that selfishness is a virtue.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

From the start, the F-35 was a testosterone fuelled dream. Jonathan Manthorpe writes:

The F-35 concept was born of fantasy fertilized by hubris. The idea was
to design and build a single plane that could perform a multitude of air
warfare tasks, and which also would incorporate all the technological
wizardry of stealth, sensor fusion and manoeuvrability. The F-35 was
intended to be an aerial combat fighter, equally at home on land or
aircraft carrier bases, also capable of performing the very different
role of close air support for ground troops. And there are to be three
versions: one for the Navy, a conventional Air Force model and a short
takeoff and landing version for the Marine Corps.

To cover the costs, the United States assumed that its NATO partners would buy into the dream. However, things have not worked out that way. Canada has put a hold on its purchase of the jet. So have a host of other NATO countries:

While Canada has put the purchase of the F-35s on hold pending reports
from a National Fighter Procurement Secretariat, Italy and the
Netherlands already have announced sharp cutbacks in the number of the
planes they plan to buy. Denmark is holding a competition that will test
the F-35 against other fighters, such as Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet.
Canada may well take the same route.

The U.K., Norway, Turkey and Israel also are tempering their initial
enthusiasm for the F-35 project and have cut back on the numbers they
planned to order a decade ago.

And the cost of the jets keeps rising:

When the programme was started in 2001, the Pentagon signed on for 2,852
planes at a cost of $233 billion. But as design problems mounted and
costly delays continued, the Pentagon reduced its order by 409 fighters.
Just to hold the lifetime cost of the programme to the gargantuan $1.5
trillion now forecast, 3,000 of the F-35s will have to be built and
sold.

The United States may fly the F-35. But the country's deficit will rise. And NATO countries do not wish to follow the American model.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

The time has come, Lawrence Martin writes, for Michael Sona to name names. If he doesn't, the Harper party will get away with what was clearly an organized attempt to steal an election. In fact, what happened in the robocall scandal was standard Harperian practice. Consider the record:

We have a party that got caught staging a deceptive phone campaign
against Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, an act that the Conservative Speaker of
the Commons called “reprehensible.” We have a party that first denied,
then admitted involvement in a deceptive robocalls campaign involving a
Saskatchewan riding redistribution dispute. A Conservative MP pointed
the finger at senior party organizer Jenni Byrne, now the Prime
Minister’s deputy chief of staff. We have a party that pleaded guilty in
2011 to Elections Act charges relating to exceeding spending limits in
the so-called “in and out” affair from the 2006 campaign.

Perhaps, facing five years in jail, Sona will pull the plug. It's clear that Elections Canada -- under Mr. Harper's appointee, Yves Coté -- has no intention of reopening his investigation into the 2011 election. That's exactly what the Conservatives want.

It was those same Conservatives who turned on Sona. One turn deserves another.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

At the centre of classical economics is the notion that man is a rational decision maker. Thus, economics is all about creating incentives. If you lower taxes, people will have more money to spend and the economy will become a virtuous cycle. But the "dead money" sitting atop the Canadian economy gives the lie to the notion that man always makes rational decisions.

Worse still, the only explanation classical economics has for unemployment is that it is a moral failure. The unemployed simply have not taken advantage of economic incentives. Shipping jobs overseas, or bringing in temporary foreign workers to replace the already employed has nothing to do with unemployment.

The same model of man as rational decision maker applies to Canadian Conservative drug policy. Create stiffer penalties for drug use, and it will decline. It's called the War on Drugs and it's been going on in the United States for forty years and filling American prisons beyond capacity.

The problem with Conservative drug policy is the same as its problem with economic policy. Man does not always make rational decisions. Devon Black writes:

The philosophy behind this approach to drug policy blends
overly-simplistic thinking with moral judgments and a fundamental
misunderstanding of addiction. In theory, harsh penalties for drug
trafficking and drug use should have a deterrent effect. Alongside tough
drug penalties come government campaigns which teach that drugs are a
choice – one it’s possible to “just say no” to. And so any rational
person, understanding the consequences of drug use, would obviously
choose to stay away.

The fatal flaw, of course, is the assumption that everyone will
respond to the same incentives. The whole nature of addiction is that
addicts keep seeking out the focus of their craving, no matter the
consequences. It’s not a matter of choice; addicts can no more say no to
drugs than I can say no to the flu. Trying to change the behaviour of a
person suffering from addiction by creating more consequences is an exercise in futility.

Compounding the problem is the fact that, for many heavy drug users,
drug use does have a twisted rationality. There’s a strong correlation
between experiencing trauma and developing problems with substance
abuse. For teens with post-traumatic stress disorder, the problem is
particularly acute: Up to 59 per cent
of them go on to develop problems with substance abuse. When there’s no
adequate mental health care available, it’s little wonder that many
people coping with the after-effects of trauma turn to illegal drugs to
manage their pain.

And so, while throwing drug users in jail might seem like a solution on the surface, it only compounds the problem. Eighty per cent
of offenders have substance abuse or addiction problems. Prisons have
tried to address this – primarily by introducing methadone replacement
therapy for inmates with opioid addictions.

We have a self-fulfilling prophecy. The War on Drugs is one of the causes of the problem it seeks to eradicate. The fatal flaw in Conservative ideology is its failure to acknowledge the irrational. And the solutions it proposes become, by extension, irrational.

Monday, August 18, 2014

You know the Conservatives are in trouble when Ian MacDonald says they are. No Liberal or Dipper, MacDonald got into politics as a spokesman for Brian Mulroney and as an ardent supporter of his high school classmate, Jim Flaherty. But now he is worried. The latest EKOS poll is bad news all around:

This isn’t the one bad poll in 20. And it wasn’t a one-night stand.

The Liberals now lead the Conservatives by 38.7 to 25.6 per cent,
with the NDP at 23.4 per cent. In effect, the Liberals have doubled
their vote from the 18.9 per cent they received in the 2011 election,
while the Conservatives have plummeted from 39.6 per cent to the
mid-20s. The Liberal brand is back.

The Liberals lead in every province except the Tory heartland of
Alberta and Saskatchewan. And where it matters most — British Columbia
and Ontario — the Liberals lead not by a little but by a lot: 37 to 22
in B.C., where the NDP is actually in second place at 26 per cent, and
46 to 28 in Ontario. Those are blow-out numbers, pointing to a Liberal
sweep of the lower B.C. mainland and the Greater Toronto Area.

In Quebec, the NDP lead with 37 per cent, with the Liberals at 30 per
cent, the Bloc at 16 per cent and the Conservatives at a measly 12 per
cent. This means the Liberals would re-gain most of the Montreal and
Outaouais regions, with the NDP retaining most of their seats in the
rest of the province. The Bloc would disappear and the Conservatives
would be shut out, except perhaps for a couple of seats in the 418
Quebec City region.

In the Atlantic zone, the Liberals lead the Conservatives 53 to 29,
with the NDP at 21 per cent. What the Conservatives are getting Down
East is pushback from voters on employment insurance reforms, much as
the Liberals did in the 1997 election. These numbers point to the
Liberals winning all but a handful of the 32 seats in the region.

And it's not just the regions that are turning against the Harperites. Demographics show that the political winds are changing:

Not only do the Liberals lead the Conservatives
among men (40-28, with the NDP at 20 per cent), the Tories fall to third
place among women (Libs 37, Dippers 27, Cons 23). And the Liberals lead
in every age demo — even in the 45-64 and 65+ segments, traditional
Tory strongholds.

So far, the Harper Party seems not to be concerned. They apparently believe that marijuana will be the wedge issue that brings Justin Trudeau down. But when party loyalists like MacDonald start to worry publicly, you know there is a bad moon rising.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Droves of baby boomers -- myself included -- have lamented the political disengagement of the young. But, in the light of Michael Sona's conviction for election fraud last week, it strikes me that perhaps the young are on to something. Chantal Hebert writes:

Electoral politics is a blood sport and an intoxicating addictive one at that, especially in an era of permanent campaigning.

To work in federal
politics these days is to breathe in partisan helium 24/7. Short-term
strategic gaming matters more than long-term policy outcomes and
consensus has become a poor cousin to finding a wedge to pry voters off a
rival.

In public, that translates into a culture of mutual disrespect that is on exhibit daily in question period.

In private, it leads
to an adversarial climate that makes it easier to rationalize making the
most of the grey zone between what is ethical and what is legal.

Justice Gary Hearn wrote that Sona's arrogance -- and his willingness to talk about it -- got him into trouble. Arrogance is not confined to the young. But it's clear that Sona's arrogant elders got away scot free.

Perhaps the young have figured out that, when they get involved in politics, they will be used by their elders and then abandoned when they become a liability.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Gerry Caplan has a sober piece in this morning's Globe and Mail. Its thesis is bleak: "No matter what leaders do, there won't be peace in the Middle East." There will be no two state solution, he writes, because both sides are not prepared to give what would be required for peace:

Whatever outsiders think, in practical terms none of the Middle East
disputants are in a position to offer the others anything like an
acceptable peace deal. Or, to put it the other way, no one is likely to
buy a deal the other offers. If Israel offers a certain set of
proposals, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, not to mention even
more radical Palestinian groups, are certain to find it too pro-Israel.
And from their perspective they’d be right. For given the politics of
Israel, no Israeli government, now or ever, would consider offering
anything that wasn’t in the best interests of Israel.

And, so, the region is in perpetual conflict:

The present confrontation, seen in proper perspective, is just another
in the endless violent conflicts between Israelis and Arabs that began
when Israel was first created as a nation 66 years ago and has never
stopped: 1947-49, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 1991, 2006, 2008-9, 2012,
2014. Why should they stop now – or ever?

Over all that time, positions have hardened and hate has exploded:

It was equally predictable that over time Israeli-Palestinian attitudes
towards each other would steadily harden. Instead of making good
neighbours, virtually all circumstances conspired to turn the two
peoples into irreconcilable enemies. Some time back, renowned Israeli
Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer told me that he believed about 25 per
cent of each people held genocidal attitudes towards the other. It seems
a safe guess that these shocking figures are now considerably higher on
both sides. When you dehumanize the other, the potential for evil knows
few boundaries.

Friday, August 15, 2014

So Michael Sona is guilty of election fraud, even though the crown prosecutor and the judge both agree that he did not act alone. The Harperites will continue to insist that Sona was just one bad apple. But that meme has become the punchline of a national joke. Michael Den Tandt writes:

There was the “in and out” affair in 2007, related to spending-limit
violations in the 2006 election, which the Conservatives minimized for
years but to which the party ultimately pleaded guilty.

In-and-out
amounted to a series of money transfers in which central campaign ad
dollars were routed through accounts belonging to dozens of MP
candidates. Elections Canada’s investigation, Mr. McGregor and Mr. Maher
later reported, cost taxpayers more than $2-million.

There was former intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue,
who was found to have overspent and accepted illegal contributions in
his winning 2011 campaign in Labrador. Mr. Penashue eventually resigned
his seat, sought re-election, and lost in a 2013 byelection to Liberal
Yvonne Jones.

There’s Dean Del Mastro, formerly Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s
parliamentary secretary and a key player for the Conservatives on the
Commons floor, now an independent on trial for exceeding spending and
donation limits, and filing a false return. Mr. Del Mastro has pleaded
not guilty. Closing arguments are expected in September.

The Harper Party rode into Ottawa full of sound and fury, outraged by the Adscam affair. However, all this putrefaction makes Adscam look like small potatoes.

Mr. McGregor and Mr. Mahar -- rest assured -- will keep digging. And Senator Duffy will be hell bent on revenge. There are all kinds of rotten apples in the Tory silo.

The latter bill, which came into effect in October 2013, requires
judges to impose $100 or $200 surcharges on convicted offenders. Prior
to the law, judges had the discretion to waive the surcharge for
offenders who could not pay. Across the country, provincial governments
rely on surcharges to fund services for victims of crime, such as sexual
assault centres.

Recently, Ontario Court Justice David Paciocco convicted Shaun
Michael of nine offences, including theft, assault and breaching
probation. Michael is a drug-addicted alcoholic Inuit man; he had to
steal food before he was 10 and started abusing alcohol when he was 13.
He lives on $250 a month.

By removing judicial discretion in the application of the law, Mr. Harper is crippling services for the very people he says he is working for. As is the case with so many other files, the prime minister's take on criminal justice makes things worse.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Mark Kennedy reports that one of the pillars of Stephen Harper's 2015 election campaign will be an all out assault on what he and his minions call "media elites." Harper stands everything on its head and creates enemies wherever he can. During his last election campaign, it was those very media elites who overwhelmingly endorsed him.

However, several of his critics have sharpened their pens. And they intend to take on the prime minister. There is, of course, Justin Trudeau's forthcoming autobiography. But, Lawrence Martin writes, there are other books in the pipeline:

There’s one from journalist Michael Harris who, with a twist on
Shakespeare, has described Mr. Harper as the “Merchant of Venom.” His
book is entitled Party of One. The theme, as described in the
book’s promo literature, is that Mr. Harper is “a profoundly
anti-democratic figure” who has “made war on every independent source of
information in Canada.”

And the theme of shutting down sources of information will be the subject of another book:

This will be followed by an offering from Mark Bourrie, another member
of Mr. Harper’s beloved Ottawa Press Gallery. It’s called Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know.
Mr. Bourrie provides chapter and verse on how the Harper machine has
tried to shut down the free flow of information through intimidation and
smear campaigns. He examines the range of anti-democratic measures
taken to override the checks and balances in the system. If Mr. Harper
wins again, writes Mr. Bourrie, “he’ll have created a new undemocratic
way of ruling Canada.”

So the PMO will be busy dealing with journalists who are now armed with evidence -- mountains of it. Expect Harper's Ministry of Truth to deny everything. The tactic has worked before -- all the way back to Chuck Cadman.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Conservatives -- at least those who are capable of sustained thought -- are beginning to wonder if now is the time for Stephen Harper to exit, stage right. The immediate cause of their inquietude is the latest EKOS poll. Tasha Kheiriddin writes:

EKOS finds that the Liberals continue to ride high at 38.7 per cent
overall support, while the Tories and the NDP jostle for second place at
25.6 and 23.4 per cent, respectively. The Greens take 7.1 per cent,
while the Bloc has 3.7 per cent, representing an anemic 16.4 per cent of
the Quebec vote.

And, though they keep trying to pull the same stunt that worked on Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, it isn't working against Justin Trudeau:

So while its ‘Reefer Madness’ campaign
pulls in cash from the Conservative base, the Conservative party itself
still can’t pull in votes from its rivals. As with other attacks on
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, the campaign succeeds in hitting
everything apart from its target: Criticizing Trudeau for supporting
marijuana legalization appears to be hardening the base, not growing it.
And that is a pattern the Tories will have to reverse before the next
election if they want a fourth term in office.

The Conservative strategy from the beginning has been to energize its base and pull in votes from key ridings across the country. Now those key ridings are unimpressed. EKOS reports that the Harperites are behind in eight of the ten provinces.

And, so, the Conservatives face an existential crisis:

The biggest unanswered question, however, is whether the Tories can win
with the leader they’ve got. The Conservative base certainly seems to
think so: eighty-six per cent would like Prime Minister Stephen Harper
to remain as leader, while only 9 per cent want him to quit and 5 per
cent don’t know or didn’t answer. These levels dovetail with Harper’s
approval rating among Conservative supporters, which sits at 89 per cent
in favour, 8 per cent against and 4 per cent undecided or unresponsive.

Among supporters of other parties, it’s an entirely different story.
Overwhelmingly, they disapprove of Harper’s performance; 86 per cent of
Liberals, 90 per cent of New Democrats, 81 per cent of Greens and 88 per
cent of Bloquistes think he is doing a bad job. But when it comes to
whether he should resign, the numbers are lower. Sixty-three per cent of
Liberals, 71 per cent of New Democrats and Greens, and 67 per cent of
Bloquistes think he should quit.

Still, when your approach to governing is "my way or the highway," inevitably, there will come a moment when the voters tell you to hit the road.

Every petrostate, including Texas and Russia, suffers from an exclusive
form of narcissism: oil exporters think they are better than everyone
else because they are sitting on piles of the world's most lucrative
commodity. In turn, that feeds an arrogant culture of entitlement.

It's really not that hard to understand:

When 30 per cent of a government's revenue stream comes from the
activities of the world's most entitled industry (the salaries for oil
and gas workers are the highest in the world), citizens pretty much turn
into apathetic recipients of petroleum welfare, because they don't pay
much in taxes.

When oil companies pay for 30 per cent of
the province's roads and schools, more than 60 per cent of the
population ultimately stops voting. When citizens become subjects, they
don't worry about representation. But, like Redford, they quickly learn
how to spell "entitlement."

And what has happened in Alberta has happened elsewhere:

Alberta's elites and media, a petroleum culture not prone to introspection, haven't read Stanford political scientist Terry Lynn Karl, because they haven't reached the bottom yet.

But no one understands petrostates better
than Karl. For 30 years, she has documented how petroleum revenues
poison democracies (Alberta), strengthen autocracies (Russia), and
spread the contamination of entitlement in public life.

"Oil states can buy political consensus," wrote Karl in a 2007 essay, because petroleum revenue "facilitates the co-optation of potential opponents or dissident voices."

But that's not all. "With basic needs met
by an often generous welfare state, with the absence of taxation, and
with little more than demands for quiescence and loyalty in return,
populations tend to be politically inactive, relatively obedient and
loyal and levels of protest remain low -- at least as long as the oil
state can deliver."

It all sounds familiar. And it echoes the career of another Alberta politician, who claims that Calgary is his hometown -- even though he was born and brought up in Toronto.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

The Harper government has been slashing government spending. But, if you take Deep Throat's advice, and follow the money -- to where it's spent and not spent -- Gregory Thomas writes that you get a real portrait of who these people are:

Despite the Harper
government’s avowed objective to reduce the federal public service by
19,000 positions, the ranks of communications staff have grown by 163
since the Conservatives took office, while costs have risen by $48
million.

The combined payroll
of federal spin doctors rivals the $329-million payroll of the House of
Commons, the beating heart of our democracy, the institution we rely
upon to keep hundreds of thousands of federal officials accountable.

But the avowed objective of the communications staff is to make sure that the government is not held accountable:

Now, $263 million
might be a reasonable price to pay — it might even be a bargain — if the
federal government actually provided Canadians with public information
in a timely manner.

But anybody who has
actually tried to phone or email someone in the federal government in
order to get an answer to a question knows that this is not the case.

The days when federal
government officials would return the telephone calls of Canadians, or
even better, answer their phones, are rapidly fading memories.

Canadians are seeing a
quarter-billion dollars of their money used against them: not to
provide them with information, but rather to delay, conceal and spin the
information to enhance the image of the party in power.

We can't afford to keep Veterans Affairs offices open. But we can afford propaganda from the Ministry of Truth. The title of this show is The Princes (and Princesses) of Hot Air.

Saturday, August 09, 2014

On Thursday, Paul Krugman wrote that evidence is mounting to support the notion that inequality can sabotage a market economy. There will always be some inequality in market economies. But gross inequality is a drag on economic growth:

It’s true that market economies need a certain amount of inequality to
function. But American inequality has become so extreme that it’s
inflicting a lot of economic damage. And this, in turn, implies that
redistribution — that is, taxing the rich and helping the poor — may
well raise, not lower, the economy’s growth rate.

Earlier this week, the new view about inequality and growth got a boost from Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, which put out a report supporting the view
that high inequality is a drag on growth. The agency was summarizing
other people’s work, not doing research of its own, and you don’t need
to take its judgment as gospel (remember its ludicrous downgrade of
United States debt). What S.& P.’s imprimatur shows, however, is
just how mainstream the new view of inequality has become. There is, at
this point, no reason to believe that comforting the comfortable and
afflicting the afflicted is good for growth, and good reason to believe
the opposite.

And the IMF has reached the same conclusion:

Specifically, if you look systematically at the international evidence on inequality, redistribution, and growth — which is what researchers at the I.M.F. did
— you find that lower levels of inequality are associated with faster,
not slower, growth. Furthermore, income redistribution at the levels
typical of advanced countries (with the United States doing much less
than average) is “robustly associated with higher and more durable
growth.” That is, there’s no evidence that making the rich richer
enriches the nation as a whole, but there’s strong evidence of benefits
from making the poor less poor.

Krugman cites Food Stamps -- the bugbear of conservatives -- as an example of redistribution that works:

Consider, for example, what we know about food stamps, perennially
targeted by conservatives who claim that they reduce the incentive to
work. The historical evidence does indeed suggest that making food stamps available somewhat reduces work effort,
especially by single mothers. But it also suggests that Americans who
had access to food stamps when they were children grew up to be
healthier and more productive than those who didn’t, which means that they made a bigger economic contribution.
The purpose of the food stamp program was to reduce misery, but it’s a
good guess that the program was also good for American economic growth.

And, if Krugman seeks more evidence that inequality is a drag on the economy, he need look no further than Canada. Since Stephen Harper gained a majority of seats in the House of Commons in 2011, he has taken a knife to government spending. This week, Canadian employment numbers were released. In the month of July, the Canadian economy produced 200 jobs -- that's not a misprint, those are two zeroes.

Friday, August 08, 2014

Justin Trudeau's autobiography will soon hit the bookstores. It's probably been ghost written and -- because it's appearing now -- it's a blatantly political document. Predictably, Conservatives are not impressed. Tasha Kheiriddin writes:

Writing an autobiography at a young age is fine if your experiences give
you something valuable to teach others. Malala Yousafzai is 16, but she
survived getting shot in the head while campaigning for girls’
education rights in Afghanistan. Anne Frank was only 13 when she went
into hiding from the Nazis during the Second World War.

The problem, she writes, is that Trudeau hasn't done anything:

He owes his current position in federal politics to the cachet of his
family name; those who pretend otherwise are kidding themselves. While
Trudeau has matured as a politician over the past few years, his resume
remains woefully thin for someone aspiring to the highest office in the
country. Had he not been the son of the most revered Liberal politician
of the past fifty years, he wouldn’t have gotten the chance.

To become a true leader — his own man — Trudeau needs to transcend
his past, not venerate it. Which is why his book’s title, and its
subject matter, are so perplexing.

I'm old enough to remember when the same complaint was made about Justin's father. And, even though I'm not old enough to remember, the same complaint was made about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I'm not sure what kind of leader the younger Trudeau is. Truth be told, I'm unhappy about his support for KeystoneXL and his one sided take on what has been happening in Gaza.

But Kheiriddin's knock against Trudeau is getting stale. And it's not working.

Thursday, August 07, 2014

They tried, "He's in over his head." That didn't work. They tried,"He'll sell pot to your kids." That went up in smoke. Now they're floating the message that Justin Trudeau "consorts with religious extremists." According to the Huffington Post:

Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino, who recently circulated flyers making questionable claims
about Trudeau's position on pot legalization, took to Twitter Wednesday
to launch a different kind of attack on the Liberal leader.

Fantino's jab about religious extremists is likely related to a story from Sun News that the Liberal leader visited the al-Sunnah al-Nabawiah mosque
in his Quebec riding. According to the network, "American government
sources" say the mosque "has been an al-Qaeda recruitment centre."

In what was obviously a coordinated attack, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney chimed in:

Steven Blaney also took to social media on Wednesday and, in posts that were retweeted by the official Conservative Party account, criticized Trudeau for associating with a group that allegedly "radicalizes" Canadians.

Even National Post columnist Jonathan Kay is having a hard time buying this barrage. Sun News, he writes, has gone over the line:

But am I the only observer who is unsettled by Sun News’ casual
suggestion that visiting congregants at a mosque is morally akin to
visiting convicted criminals in a prison? Or the network’s strategy of
scaremongering confused viewers about the number of Muslims in this
country? Or libelling a Trudeau advisor as some sort of al-Qaeda
cheerleader because his geopolitical views happen to lie to the left of
John Baird and Stephen Harper?

Fantino and Blaney have happily joined Sun in crossing that line, forgetting that:

Justin Trudeau’s riding of Papineau is one of the poorest and most
diverse in Canada. It is full of immigrants who are wrestling with the
process of integrating into Canadian life. What sort of MP would we want
for such a riding — one who brags to Sun News viewers about how he
wouldn’t set foot within 50 feet of this or that house of prayer, lest
he be tainted by association with the teeming Muslim hordes who pray
therein … or someone who actually seeks to engage with these people and
draw them into the political mainstream?

Fantino, Blaney and Sun -- the government's unofficial mouthpiece -- have confirmed once again that the Harper government truly deserves the sobriquet, "The Nut Gallery."

In a study
released last week, the 56-year-old research organization called on
federal policy-makers to recognize Canada is experiencing a slow-growth
recovery that requires different tools than the fiscal and monetary
standbys of the past. “A significant rebound in Canadian private demand
is unlikely in the near future,” says author Christopher Ragan,
a professor of economics at McGill University. “Policy-makers should
recognize the challenges that emanate from a slow-growth recovery:
longer unemployment spells, more part-time employment and increased
incidence of long-term unemployment.”

The report's author is Christopher Ragan, an economics professor at McGill. But Ragan is more than an academic. He has also worked for the federal finance department. And he simply points out that Harper's insistence on austerity isn't working:

His depiction of the
current state of affairs — presented in language a non-economist can
easily grasp — matches what Canadians see around them: a dearth of jobs,
a precariously high level of household debt, a hyper-charged housing
market, a risk-averse business climate and sub-par growth.

None of these trends
is likely to change in the short term, Ragan argues. Cutting interest
rates won’t juice growth; they’re already as low as they can go without
harming the economy. And stimulative spending is out; Harper refuses to
carry a deficit into the next election.

Ragan favours balanced budgets -- but not now. And he offers some suggestions on how to fix the economy:

A new income support program for unemployed workers. Unlike employment insurance,
which covers less than half of Canada’s jobless workers, the temporary
unemployment assistance that Ragan recommends would be a loan repayable,
contingent on income, when the individual found work.

An all-out effort to eliminate barriers to labour mobility.
On Ottawa’s part, the primary impediment is EI, which discourages
individuals in high unemployment regions from moving. On the provinces’
part, it is incompatible certification procedures for skilled trades and
professions.

A renewed effort to improve job training. Ottawa’s last attempt, the Canada Job Grant,
was undercut by provincial hostility, wildly exaggerated estimates of
skill shortages and a massive influx of temporary foreign workers.

None of these suggestions are radical measures. They're the kind of things C.D. Howe would recommend. But what they do suggest is that the so called "steady hand" may be a stupid hand -- caught in a rut of its own making.

Tuesday, August 05, 2014

Yesterday, the prime minister attended a ceremony to mark Canada's entry into the First World War. The standard interpretation of Canada's part in that war is that we blindly followed Britain to war. But we emerged from it a mature, independent nation. Andrew Cohen writes that the one hundredth anniversary of that war is a good time to ask some hard questions. After all,

It was a wasting conflict – a slaughterhouse, really – killing more
Canadians than all of Canada’s wars before or since. As the superb
historian Tim Cook says: “It was a total, unlimited war … felt all the
way back through Canadian society.”

Some 620,000 Canadians served, of whom 60,000 died. It was
devastating in a country of eight million; today, the equivalent would
be 250,000 dead.

But was it worth it? And would we do it again?

In a fine essay in the current Maclean’s, Peter Shawn Taylor puts some
of these questions to leading historians and commentators. He comes up
with some hard truths.

One is that the Great War evoked a depth of sacrifice in a
conservative, Christian, rural, lily-white, Anglo-Saxon country that
seems “unfathomable” today. Canada was a more deferential society, half
its population of British descent, willing to follow the mother country
into the killing fields.

In reflecting on the Great War a century after its outbreak, what is
striking is the consensus that Canada could mount no such effort today,
that we lack the kind of pride, attachment or national honour that that
enterprise demanded.

These days, our patriotism is rather facile:

These paroxysms around the Olympics or other boasts (the strength of
our banking system, our successful multiculturalism) inevitably bring a
predictable breathlessness. We’re the best in the world! We’re the
greatest!

This is what passes for patriotism in Canada in 2014. It demands
nothing of us. Our pride in country, however real, does not seem to
manifest itself in anything very substantial, such as volunteerism,
voting, or national service, community or military.

Our prime minister talks like General Patton. But he treats voters as consumers:

Balance the budget, keep cell-phone rates low, fill in the potholes. No big ideas or no national projects, please.

On the other hand, that very attitude might have kept us out of World War I. And, one hundred years later, the whole enterprise seems rather futile.

Monday, August 04, 2014

History is full of ugly ironies. Among the ugliest is the Netanyahu government's use of the Big Lie to justify what is happening in Gaza. Chris Hedges writes that, while covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza
refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic
over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years
old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened
fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as
Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such
incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire.
I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron
fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza City. I saw the
corpses of the victims, including children. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory.
I have watched Israel demolish homes and entire apartment blocks to
create wide buffer zones between the Palestinians and the Israeli troops
that ring Gaza. I have interviewed the destitute and homeless families,
some camped out in crude shelters erected in the rubble. The
destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. I have stood in the remains of schools—Israel struck two United Nations schools in the last six days, causing at least 10 fatalities at one in Rafah on Sunday and at least 19
at one in the Jebaliya refugee camp Wednesday—as well as medical
clinics and mosques. I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or
mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that
the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites.
I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have
never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”

Truth is always the first casualty of war. And so it is in Gaza -- which exists in another world:

This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational
becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in “The
Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind,” those who supply the masses with the
illusions they crave become their master, and “whoever attempts to
destroy their illusions is always their victim.” This irrationality
explains why the reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the
courage to speak the truth—Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky,
Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappé,
Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss—is so rabid. That so many of these voices
are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who are
among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate.

Hate is at the root of what is happening in Gaza. And the Big Lie justifies hate. It turns history on its head; but it also destroys history:

As Hannah Arendt
pointed out, the ancient and modern sophists sought to win an argument
at the expense of the truth, those who wield the Big Lie “want a more
lasting victory at the expense of reality.” The old sophists, she said,
“destroyed the dignity of human thought.” Those who resort to the Big
Lie “destroy the dignity of human action.” The result, Arendt warned, is
that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.” And when
facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the
truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no
useful exchange of information. The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by
Israel, as perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems
in the world to the brutish language of violence. And when oppressed
people are addressed only through violence they will answer only through
violence.

Martin Luther King suggested that the only legitimate response to force was "soul force." At the moment, there is precious little of that -- anywhere.

Sunday, August 03, 2014

Rumour has it that CETA -- the Canadian-European Trade Agreement -- is in trouble. The problem is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism. Germany doesn't like it. Jim Stanford writes:

Germany's limited experience with ISDS (it was recently sued by a
Swedish company for billions in lost profits resulting from its
phase-out of nuclear power) has heightened these concerns.

Canada has had lots of experience with ISDS -- and it has not been good:

As Scott Sinclair has demonstrated through his detailed, careful research for the CCPA,
Canada has been sued far more under NAFTA's Chapter 11 than its North
American neighbours: some 35 times in total, with claims totalling many
billions of dollars. Enough of those claims have been successful (either
through awarded judgments or through out-of-court negotiated
settlements) to make any politician think twice before passing a measure
which could spark this corporate counter-attack. Indeed, Canada may be
the nation most targeted by ISDS actions. The docket of cases against
Canada under Chapter 11 constitutes an offensive grab-bag of
corporations' willingness to put their own profits ahead of the public
interest. On topics as diverse as regulations on harmful gasoline
additives, to generic drugs, to handling of toxic substances, to
Quebec's recent ban on gas fracking -- in every case, the ISDS system is
another potent club with which business can intimidate governments into
accepting their economic and political dominance -- and punish those
which do not.

Yet the Harper government has insisted that such a mechanism be included in all of its trade agreements. And if if ISDS were to be taken out of the agreement with Europe, Harper's other trade agreements would be in trouble.

Harper has always been dedicated to making the world safe for capital. But the world is catching on.

Saturday, August 02, 2014

Today, without exaggerating Canada’s influence anywhere, it is
instructive how offside Canada is on various issues with traditional
allies.

For example, every country with which Canada has been
traditionally allied has been calling for a ceasefire in the
Israeli-Hamas “conflict” (or “war” if you prefer). The Obama
administration has been using whatever diplomatic leverage it could to
bring one about. Canada, by contrast, stands mute, which is to say the
government might like a cessation of hostilities (or maybe not for the
time being), but will continue to take its cue from the government of
Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.

On Iran, Canada is full of fire and brimstone:

It also lines up with the Netanyahu government in being fearful of
nuclear talks with Iran. Yes, the Harper government nominally says it
hopes the talks might reach an agreement, but the terms of success as
articulated by Ottawa are those of the Netanyahu government and, as
such, can never be the foundation of a negotiated agreement.

So,
once again, Canada is offside with the United States, Britain, France
and Germany, which are negotiating with Iran. Fire-breathing rhetoric
continues to be directed from Ottawa at Tehran. The Canadian embassy
there remains closed, whereas the British have just reopened theirs.

On relations with Russia, Canada has the luxury of having limited trade
and few contacts, a perfect setting for bullhorn diplomacy directed not
just at Vladimir Putin, but indirectly and indiscreetly at European
allies admittedly torn and dithering about how to handle Russia because
they, unlike Canada, have substantial interests and a long intertwined
history. Lectures from Ottawa will be as appreciated (and therefore
unhelpful) in the capitals of Western Europe as the ones former finance
minister Jim Flaherty used to direct about the European Union’s struggle
with its economic policies in the years following the crash of 2008.

The Harper government -- true to its fundamentalist roots -- treats the other countries of the world like sinners in the hands of an angry God, sure that only Canada and Israel will be swept away in the Great Rapture.

But ordering the audits of environmental charities may be the tipping point. And Smith speaks from experience:

I can tell you from personal experience (because I ran one of the
country’s major environmental organizations for nearly 10 years) that,
to a one, Canada’s environmental charities have always been extremely
serious about complying with the letter and the spirit of CRA charitable
rules. To have that sincere attempt thrown in its face by a tax agency
that clearly isn’t playing straight has galvanized the environmental
community in a way it never has been before.

Harper's attacks on his enemies have a way of boomeranging on him. And Smith believes that is precisely what is happening. Harper could well become a victim of his own war:

Of course it’s true that the obvious environmental impact of the Harper
years will be measured in increased levels of pollution and real damage
to precious land and waters. The less obvious and possibly longer
lasting impact will be the creation of a country energized to decisively
break with the failed environmental policies of the past in favour of a
better future for us all.

It would be more than fitting if the prime minister sealed his own fate through the law of unintended consequences.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.